White King Red Rubber Black Death

Leopold the second has been honoured as a great king in the Belgian schoolbooks for the past hundred years, even though is he responsible for the death of ten million African natives in Congo. That’s what this very controversial documentary claims. In 1885 the biggest western nation powers granted King Leopold a kind of philanthropist sovereignty over this unexplored African country. The king assigned an explorer to look after the “clearing” of his land, which soon suffered the inordinate exploitation of its natural resources due to the industrial rush on natural rubber. The lampoon film exhumes the hidden story and the darkest pages of the economical and human chapters, and using the (too?) heavy word of genocide, treats Leopold of Saxe Cobourg Gotha as an equal to Hitler in the field of universal cruelty and guilt. Would you be really astonished to discover that as soon as this film’s broadcast was announced, the Belgian Royal Palace was brought to the boil, and doesn’t yet like this film? And they are not the only Belgians to curse this British filmmaker...